Craig Layne

So you have your blog up and running and you are playing with all of the settings. You make it to the setting to update your permalinks so they display more than just a number for the post. It all seems to go well, but when you go to your blog to check things out, you notice every page is broken except for your homepage.

Don’t fret, this happens to people all of the time. It is quite possibly one of the most common problems I have heard of. It is caused when the .htaccess file does not allow wordpress to add the proper code to redirect to the new permalinks.

How to fix it:

There are two solution’s here. You can either update your .htaccess file manully, or let wordpress do it for you.

Manually fixing it:

1. Log into wordpress and navigate to the permalink settings page.
2. Select your desired permalink structure and click save changes.
3. Now if wordpress was unable to make the necessary updates it will output some code at the bottom of the page. This code needs to be added to your .htaccess file. This file is found in the same directory as wordpress.
4. Save the updated file and try things out.

Letting WordPress fix it:

This fix is for people who aren’t comfortable messing with code.

1. First you will need to open the directory where wordpress is installed either through your control panel or ftp.
2. Then locate the .htaccess file found in your wordpress directory.
3. Change the file permisions of the .htaccess file to 777, be sure to write down it’s original settings.

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4. Log into wordpress, and navigate to your permalink settings.
5. Select your desired permalink structure and click save changes.
6. Now change your .htaccess file back yo it’s original settings for security reasons.

Hopefully this little tutorial will help you solve your issues. If you have any further questions just comment here and I will answer them.